Wednesday, 22 January 2014

Words cannot describe how happy I am to add another supplier to my shop! Käpynen are a Finnish company supplying great prints on cotton / elastane jersey, but also on really amazing sweatshirting. Patterned sweatshirting, how I love thee. The two colour ways of Diamonds and the Sugar Skulls are all 150cm width 95% cotton / 5% elastane sweatshirt blends, so there is good stretch recovery, and they have a soft looped backing. Nice and sturdy, but not at all bulky. The Sock N' Roll (which is undoubtably one of the best named fabrics ever), is a 95% cotton / 5% elastane jersey in a massive 170cm width. There are striped, dotty, starry, and heart-print socks arrayed in a non-directional fashion so you can flip your patterns pieces up and down. The sweatshirting is the same!

Also crossing the threshold yesterday was a massive box from Lillestoff. It included a lot of restocks, including Bunny Good Night (which sold out in record time so I quickly put in another order before it's gone entirely), Missing Duck, Vichy, and the ever-popular plain petrol jersey. The Jeans Jersey that has sold out three times in blue has now been replaced with Jeans Jersey in black. It's not an overall black because the ribbed texture softens the colour, and the backing is the same brushed texture that makes it omg-so-soft. I've also added two skinny stripes (petrol / aqua and blue / raspberry) that measure 1/2cm tall. And, and, AND. Two more prints! Hippie Day is designed by Sari Ahokainen of Bunny Good Night and Rainbowphant fame, and has camper vans, hearts, flowers, peace signs, rainbows, butterflies, and hearts in retro technicolour. Maritime Dots is a seaside print with seagulls (some wearing crowns because obviously), anchors, and an array of multi-coloured dots. The colours are just really, really lovely and I think it's be excellent for some grown up clothes.

January is proving very busy. On top of the perpetual revolving door of fabric coming in and going out, I got my first Mac which I'm struggling to get to grips with. Googling how to do even the most basic things is almost a full time job and to add to that I'm also trying to learn Illustrator before my free trial runs out and I have to decide whether to pay Adobe mega bucks in perpetuity until I die. Over the next month I'm participating in fun series and a pattern tour and of course I also have both year-end taxes and VAT returns due because procrastination and avoidance are irresistible. Once my commitments to others and the HMRC have settled down, I hope to have an official sew-along for the Penny Pinafore which will cover the construction in greater depth, lots of fabric and fitting advice, and some ideas to play with the pattern. And here's a sneaky peak of a pattern I'm working on...

Friday, 10 January 2014

The first box of fabric of 2014 arrived today and it's a doozy! We've got from left to right, top to bottom: Bunny Good Night, Wonderfly, Inuit, Inuit Whale, and Frau Holle Dotties*. So desperate was I to get my hands on Bunny Good Night that I took my laptop down to the library after hours to sit in the car in the dark and freezing cold to use their wifi to submit my order. I REGRET NOTHING. It's by the designer of the most popular fabric in the world- Rainbowphant- and despite putting in a larger order than usual, I think it'll go pretty fast. Because I'm using it all for me. Wonderfly is a large scale retro-style butterfly that would be particularly good for the ladeez, Inuit and Inuit Whales are too adorable by at least half, and Frau Holle Dotties is a great blender as well as being pretty badass on its own. All of them are uploaded to the shop!

It's definitely 2014 now despite the fact I'll write 2013 in all correspondence for at least nine more months and with a new year, we all say 'out with the old, in with the new', amirite? So I've discounted (by at least 30%!) twenty of my older fabrics in the sale section to make some room in the fabric vault. Three new suppliers are on deck and I need the space.